Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [128]
You would have been in college by then, on Christmas vacation as I was. But I remembered you not much older than Rupa, and I remembered a day after a snowstorm, when something I’d said caused you, like Rupa and Piu, to cry. I had hated every day I spent under your parents’ roof, but now I thought back to that time with nostalgia. Though we didn’t belong there, it was the last place that had felt like a home. In pretending that my mother wasn’t sick and being around people who didn’t know, a small part of me had been able to believe that it was true, that she would go on living just as your mother had. The second house was different. There phone calls were made freely to the doctors, medicine bottles were strewn about, the paraphernalia of her illness taking over every corner of every room. In spite of all the effort and money my mother put into that house, we had never been able to inhabit it properly, and because of what was happening to her we never felt happy. It was there that my mother prepared to depart for another place altogether, one where we would be unable to join her, and from which she would not return.
One day close to the Canadian border, walking along cliffs overlooking the Bay of Fundy, I found a spot that was particularly striking. A sign told me I was in the easternmost state park in the country. The trail was not easy, falling through rich-smelling pine forests. The tops of the trees were spindly, their lower boughs dusted with snow. The wind ripped and chewed through everything, and the water was a sheer drop down. I crossed paths with no one. For a long time I watched the approach and retreat of the waves, their thick caps crashing apart against the rocks, that eternally restless motion having an inversely calming effect on me. The following day I returned to the same spot, this time bringing with me the shoebox of my mother’s photographs. I sat on the ground, opened the box, and began going through the pictures one by one, as if they were pieces of mail that I was quickly scanning and would read later on. But there were too many pictures, and after a few I, like my father, could no longer bear their sight. A slight lessening in the pressure of my fingertips and the ones I was holding would have blown away into that wild sea, scattering down to where my mother’s ashes already resided. But I could not bear that either, and so I put them back in the box and began to break the hardened ground. I only had a stick and a sharpedged rock to work with and the hole was not impressive, but it was deep enough to conceal the box. I covered it with dirt and stones. The moon’s first light was shining down when I was done, and I walked back, aided by that same beam of light, to my car.
A few weeks before my college graduation my father called to say that he was selling our house, that he and Chitra and the girls were moving to a more traditional one in a less isolated suburb of Boston. There were other Bengalis nearby and an Indian grocery in the town, things that were more important to Chitra than the proximity of the ocean and Modernist architecture had been for my mother. I would not be following my father to that new house; I had made plans to travel in South America after graduating. The events over Christmas had never been discussed, never acknowledged. Along with my father, Chitra and Rupa and Piu watched my commencement sitting on folding chairs on the grass, clapping when it was my turn to walk to the dais, posing beside me for photographs in my cap and gown. The girls were polite to me, respectful of the fact that it was my day, but at the same time it was as if we’d never met. I knew that they had never revealed anything to Chitra or to my father about the things I had said and done that night, that it would remain between the three of us, that in